Catheters are used in a wide variety of minimally-invasive or percutaneous medical procedures. One type of catheter is an intravascular catheter, which enables a physician to remotely perform a medical procedure by inserting the catheter into the vascular system of the patient at an easily accessible location and navigating the tip of the catheter to the target site. Using catheter-guided methods, many internal sites may be remotely accessed through the patient's vascular system or other body lumen structure.
In some applications, a needle may be connected to a catheter assembly to deliver a therapeutic agent into remote sites within a patient's body. For example, in a percutaneous myocardial revascularization procedure, the inside surface of the heart is accessed by an intravascular catheter via a retrograde route through the venous system. A needle is advanced through the catheter, and the heart muscle is then injected with therapeutic agents, such as stem cells or drugs, to promote new blood vessel formation in the heart muscle.
FIG. 1 shows a PRIOR ART myocardial injection catheter 100 with an injection needle 140 positioned in the myocardium of myocardial wall 130. The beating of the heart can cause needle tip 142 to move from position A to position B relative to the myocardium. It is desirable to provide a catheter device that can deliver therapeutic or diagnostic agents to the myocardium while reducing the risk of injury.
The art referred to or described above is not intended to constitute an admission that any patent, publication or other information referred to herein is “prior art” with respect to this invention. In addition, this section should not be construed to mean that a search has been made or that no other pertinent information as defined in 37 C.F.R. §1.56(a) exists.
All U.S. patents and applications and all other published documents mentioned anywhere in this application are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Without limiting the scope of the invention, a brief summary of some of the claimed embodiments of the invention is set forth below. Additional details of the summarized embodiments of the invention and/or additional embodiments of the invention may be found in the Detailed Description of the Invention below.
A brief abstract of the technical disclosure in the specification is provided for the purposes of complying with 37 C.F.R. §1.72.